Wicked awesome Hulu is co-opting archrival YouTube’s traffic. If you do a search for Simpsons clips on YouTube, you’re likely to see clips uploaded to YouTube by Hulu. Here’s one I found:
Rather than try to rewrite more than a decade of Web practices (if not copyright law), Hulu is working the system to reach a lot of interested users where they are. It’s a brilliant move and the kind of thinking that is virtually nonexistent within the newspaper industry.
The clip promotes Hulu as the destination for premium content on the Internet. Users have a clear choice: watch excerpts with an annoying Hulu ticker on YouTube or go to hulu.com where they can watch the full video in higher quality without the ticker.
In the short run, this helps Google by providing content for popular queries. In the long run, hulu is the big winner.
If I could award an Emmy for outstanding performance in television, I’d have a clear winner: Hulu. The video site from NBC and Fox is my leading choice for product of the year. Hulu allows users to stream television shows from NBC, Fox, Comedy Central and select other networks. Most shows are available the day after they air on television. There is also a decent collection of classic television; I recently finished watching the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. A small collection of movies rounds out the offering.
The networks have many of the assets they need to deliver a compelling product — one much better than YouTube for copyrighted content. But I wouldn’t bet on it. And I wouldn’t hold my breath on NBC and News Corp. making the summer launch date.
Although I was right about Hulu not making its launch date, I was wrong about its inability to deliver a compelling product. Unlike the music industry, which still refuses to acknowledge the turn of the century, the television networks have responded forcefully and credibly to the threat posed by YouTube.
Over the summer, I spent at least triple the time on Hulu as I did on YouTube. That will be even more skewed when the fall TV season kicks into high gear this week. The quality of the video is much better. Searching is also easier: unlike YouTube, you won’t see the same piece of content 12 times in search results. You also don’t have to weed through content that was taken down due to DMCA claims.
To be sure, there’s nothing truly innovative in Hulu. But the execution of what they do is great. The site is visually elegant and easy-to-use. You can subscribe to your favorite shows. You can embed videos on your blog. My favorite feature is the ability to create custom clips by dragging sliders.
Hulu does a good job (perhaps too good) of helping users discover content they might be interested in. There are some feeble attempts at social networking.
The networks are using Hulu to promote the fall season. Some shows, such as Knight Rider, were made available on Hulu before their television debuts to drum up interest.
Hulu is also doing some interesting things in advertising. More on that later.
As much as I like Hulu, I have a long wishlist:
Hulu on my TV. It’s hard to beat watching TV on a TV. A laptop display doesn’t cut it. Although my TV has a VGA input, that still means using the laptop to control playback. Hulu should seek to be on as many platforms as possible: Xbox, Tivo and Apple TV for starters.
Hulu on the go. There are times when I want to watch Hulu on my laptop. But those are also times when I’m disconnected — on a plane or a train. NBC offers downloads of many of its shows through NBC Direct; Hulu should do the same.
Local buffering of videos while watching. Unlike YouTube, you can’t buffer content. This deteriorates video playback quality by causing stuttering when you have inconsistent bandwidth. It also means that if you want to rewind, that video has to be restreamed. (This is more expensive for Hulu.) Even a two minute buffer would dramatically improve the experience.
More consistent content licensing. Hulu is at the mercy of its content providers for when content is made available and has to expire. Although many shows are available next day, shows like Monk and Psych are delayed eight days.
Fewer restrictions on embedded clips. Hulu clips expire along with the content, leaving holes in Web pages that embed videos. Although I wouldn’t expect full embeds to remain available, it would be nice to see exceptions for short clips.
Better descriptions in search results. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, Sep 18, 2008″ isn’t very helpful. The guest names should be included.
The New York Times ran a great profile of fake news purveyor Jon Stewart this weekend. According to a 2007 Pew poll, Stewart was tied with real newsmen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Andersen Cooper and Dan Rather for #4 as the journalist they most admired.
The Daily Show is my go to source for television news. Stewart and his crew do a much better job than “real” journalists on calling politicians on their hypocrisy. The Times profile barely touches on Stewart’s agenda-setting effect; it isn’t uncommon to see hypocrisy exposed on his show get called out later in more traditional news shows.
Stewart is as tough, if not tougher, on journalists. His media criticism is often sharper than that of Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. (Kurtz frequently uses clips from The Daily Show on his CNN program Reliable Sources.)
The show has also changed my expectations of the late night talk show. I find that I’m disappointed when the interview segment is an actor, instead of an author or politician.
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are ahead of many in the old media when it comes to presenting video content on the Web. After a slow start, this year’s upgrades to the Web site show that they really get the new world of audience interaction and content delivery. Full episodes of each show are available the day after broadcast. You can scroll back through previous episodes. Videos can be embedded on Web sites. Want to see that clip everyone is talking about? The search feature lets you easily find it. You can even find shows going back years. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get video from a specific date years ago.
The Times could learn from them. The nearly 3,000 word story includes two pictures and not a single video. The author describes a few segments, including an extended description of Stewart’s first post 9/11 broadcast, which scream for video. (The video is available on thedailyshow.com.)
Google has integrated geotagged YouTube videos into Google Earth. By selecting the “YouTube” layer in the “Featured Content” section section of Google Earth, you can see the locations of YouTube videos. Clicking on the icon allows you to play the video in Google Earth.
It is a great way to learn about a place.
As with geotagged pictures, the biggest challenge is the volume and variety of content. Even with the limited amount of geotagging happening today, major cities are blanketed with videos. The white markers in the screenshot above are a fraction of the geotagged videos. As you zoom in further, more appear.
They include videos of tourist sites, personal birthday parties, concerts, subway trains going by, etc. We’ll need ways to filter the firehose of content to what we’re interested in at the moment. Google Earth already does a great job of letting you pick among data sources; I suspect that in the near future the YouTube layer will be segmented by category.
Note: If you are reading this on the blog (instead of an RSS reader) you can roll over any of the links and watch the video right on this page.
Last night’s CNN/YouTube debate was a triumph of public participation in the political process. Although it served as a long promotional stunt for CNN (I saw breathless hyping of it on CNN 48 hours out), the format worked.
It’s tempting to say, let’s throw the journalists out of the process. Tempting, but wrong. The two dozen or so questions were selected by CNN from among almost 3,000 videos submitted on YouTube. The debate began with an explanation of how CNN selected the questions. No people in costumes. No using children to ask grown up questions. No stuffing the ballot box, as Joe Biden’s campaign tried to do with a question on the war. The most viewed question on YouTube — about whether Arnold Schwarchenegger is a cyborg — wasn’t put to the candidates.
As interesting as the questions were, most of the responses weren’t. Candidates, as in ordinary debates, often deflected the question and went straight to their talking points. I thought John Edwards did the best job of directly answering questions.
My biggest complaint about the format was the way the YouTube questions were shown. Instead of being shown full screen, they were shown as projected on a screen in the auditorium. When Mike Sharley was using flashcards to ask his question from a wheelchair, the camera cut away to a shot of Andersen Cooper staring at the screen. Even now, I can’t easily find all of the original questions that were selected. Here is my best guess at the Sharley video.
Here is my pick for the most entertaining question of the night:
A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.
In today’s Web world, they’re a terrible measure of user engagement. A user who spends 10 minutes watching a video or 15 minutes engaged in a flash game counts the same as a user who hit your site by accident from a search engine.
Even for non-multimedia experiences, chasing page views can create terrible user experiences. Consider some examples:
Splitting news stories onto separate pages. Each page of the story counts as a page view. Not only is the paging annoying to the user, it hurts the way your pages are indexed making it harder for people to find your content in search engines. It’s been a while since I worked in the news business, but I’d love to see what the drop offs are at each page.
Pointless confirmation pages. Many sites take you to confirmation pages just so they can count the additional page.
Popups/popunders/etc. I read a story while back about a publisher using popup- and popunder-ads to pump their page view numbers.
Ignoring page view metrics has created some great experiences:
Google Maps. If you drag the map around the screen, you count as one page view. But to the user this is much easier and a much better experience than the old model of clicking an arrow on the side of the screen and waiting for the page to refresh.
YouTube’s embedded videos. If they’d been chasing page views, they never would have allowed users to embed videos on their own blogs.
Yahoo’s streaming quotes. You don’t have to refresh the page to see the latest stock price.
Flash-based instant messaging. You can chat with your friends without having to download and install a special client.
Not only are they much better experiences, it can save the publisher money. It takes less bandwidth and processing power to send down just the updated information than it does to generate and send an entire page.
Nielsen’s time-on-site measurement is an improvement over page views, but as with any single measurement it can be gamed. The best managers will look at a range of metrics specific to their situation.
I’ve written before about the fragmentation of television. With cable and satellite, programmers can reach smaller and smaller audience segments. With content delivered over broadband, those segments become even smaller. Broadband distribution ultimately enables everyone to have his or her own channel.
People are already broadcasting their lives using Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking tools. You can see their latest pictures, video and random thoughts.
That’s a fairly active process right now; you have to seek out the various social networks to consume that information. Incorporate these services into television and you can expand the reach. You’d be able to change to the “grandkids” channel, just as easily as you tune in to the Discovery Channel. I can imagine grandparents tuning their TVs to the all grandkids channel, featuring pictures and video of their own grandchildren. Of course, content within these virtual channels would also be available on demand.
There are a couple of services out there that approximate parts of this experience. One of my favorite flickr add ons is slickr. It downloads pictures from your flickr contacts and runs them in place of your Windows screensaver. It’s a fun, passive way to keep up with my friends are up to.
On the video side, TiVo has a relationship with One True Media that allows you to share videos with friends and family that play back on their TiVos.
Apple TV’s integration of YouTube doesn’t currently allow you to subscribe to a person’s videos, but I expect we’ll see that soon enough.
I got the YouTube software upgrade on my Apple TV today. As impressed as I was with Apple TV, the YouTube upgrade is a very welcome addition.
From the YouTube menu, you can watch featured videos, highest rated videos, most viewed and most recent. You can also log into you account and see your favorite videos.
The user interface and graphics of the YouTube implementation are as gorgeous as for the other features of Apple TV. The quality of the video varies dramatically based on the quality of the source content. It’s not HD, but some videos were as good as standard TV quality. After watching a video, you get a list of related videos.
The YouTube content available on Apple TV right now is thin. Of the 22 videos I have in my favorites, only 2 were available on Apple TV. The featured video list, however, largely reflects the videos featured on the YouTube homepage.
A search option is also available, though trying to type out keywords using the onscreen keyboard is more trouble than its worth. The search filters as you type providing a list of available videos, saving you some remote control torture if the video you’re looking for appears before you finish typing.
Upgrading the software was relatively painless, but I had to prompt my machine to check for the upgrade. It took about seven minutes total.
I encountered a few glitches: Some of the videos played back without audio. The on-screen keyboard wasn’t always responsive. The search implementation is a little odd; the number of results can go or up or down with each letter entered.
What’s missing? I’d like a way to create playlists for Apple TV from the Web. Right now there is no indication on YouTube.com of which videos are playable on Apple TV (or on mobile for that matter).
If Apple can bring flickr to Apple TV with a similar execution, I’ll be thrilled.
Now you can kill time watching YouTube videos anywhere, assuming you have a phone that can display streaming video. You should also have an unlimited data plan, lest you have to hold up a Brinks truck to pay your cell phone bill. Just go to http://m.youtube.com. (The link also works from a Web browser.)
The current version of the service is limited to selected videos. You can’t log into your account and show strangers videos of your kids or access your playlists. According to the FAQ, “We have a selected library of videos on the mobile website. We try to make the best videos from the website available on mobile, and we are working hard to add more content.”
The videos were intelligible on my Samsung A900, though noticeably worse than the same videos on the Web. The quality will suffice for killing a few minutes before a flight.
YouTube and CNN announced today debates with Democratic and Republican candidates for president. The debates will feature video questions uploaded to YouTube and will air on CNN this summer and fall. Audience questions have been featured in presidential debates before, but these are usually submitted in writing and read by a moderator or asked by an audience member in a “town hall” format.
Video adds another dimension: the questioners can use props and backgrounds to help illustrate their question. Although the questions will be screened for content and production values, it should be interesting to watch. I hope that all submitted videos will be available, not just the ones that are aired.
YouTube has already had a large effect on American politics. If it weren’t for his macaca moment, it’s very likely George Allen would have been re-elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia, tipping the balance in the U.S. Senate. A gaffe that otherwise wouldn’t have made it on TV blew up in Allen’s face after being posted on YouTube.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has issued a guide for candidates (pdf) on how to make the most of Internet video. Among the guidelines: assume that you’re on camera all the time, record every public event of your own and send people to record video of your opponent.
The guide also emphasizes the importance of email, blogs and the Web in a section comparing the old vs. new ways of communicating messages to the public. Its conclusion: “Voters hear about issue/candidate/opponent through blog community, local newspaper, local news station, national media, email, website, etc.” (The Politico has a great analysis.)
Internet video allows candidates to get their precisely crafted, highly produced message to voters without being filtered by the mainstream media. But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the top videos aren’t those produced by the candidates.
An anti-Clinton “1984″ video, in which the New York senator is portrayed as a Big Brother-ish figure, accounted for about 75% of all traffic to candidate-related videos on YouTube in March, Nielsen found.
